Software’s AI trade moves from fear to opportunity
CRM•Salesforce points to AI-driven demand
That may be changing. Salesforce last week said net new annual order value growth, a measure of new subscription bookings less cancellations, reached its highest level in four years. It was driven in part by the company’s AI offerings under Agentforce, where annualized recurring revenue of $1.5 billion beat TD Cowen analysts’ estimate. For good measure, Marc Benioff got Anthropic boss Dario Amodei on television to say his company was “not interested in destroying anyone,” an on-the-nose rebuke to the briefly pervasive belief that its Claude model would, in fact, destroy a series of industries.
Benioff and his team mentioned the companies’ new partnership, , roughly 20 times during Salesforce’s earnings call, in case the message didn’t sink in. The BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index, which tracks the titans of software, has finally risen back above its pre-SaaSpocalypse peak. Investors might finally be ready to consider the reward on the other side of AI risk.
